Meretz leader one-ups Naftali Bennett

Zahava Gal-on, the chairwoman of the lefty Meretz party, was quick to react to Naftali Bennett’s smart-alecky “Stop apologizing” video on Wednesday, offering her own game of dress-up to rival that of the Jewish Home party leader.

Bennett had taken the role of an awkward, overly apologetic Tel Aviv lumbersexual to lampoon the left’s propensity for self-examination. The video concluded that Israelis should stop apologizing for their government’s policies and instead vote for the unabashedly patriotic Jewish Home party.

At first, Gal-on’s video seems like a tit-for-tat response to Bennett’s campaign spot. In the short clip, uploaded to Facebook Wednesday, she can be seen putting on a long skirt, wig and headscarf, then asking her assistant if the settler look is convincing.

But after she finalizes her outfit, the video cuts to its real message: “Meretz doesn’t make fun of its brothers and sisters, Meretz works for everybody.” (Bennett often refers to his supporters as “brothers and sisters.”)

But despite the mature message, our readers may recall a music video, released earlier this year, in which former and current left-wing politicians, including members of Gal-on’s own party, lampooned the right to the melody of George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set on You.”

Dressed in costumes imitating West Bank settlers and wearing shirts bearing right-wing slogans, the singers chanted, “How fun to be right-wing” and “How easy to be racist.”

“How fun it is that there is no partner [for peace], and that the Arabs only understand force and bombs,” Former Meretz MK Yossi Beilin sang, standing in front of a green screen showing a West Bank outpost. “Because without Arabs, with what would I scare you? Monsters?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoEPmwfH6So

The video, produced and first uploaded by the Peace Now settlement watchdog, has since been made private and is no longer available for public view on its official YouTube channel.